History

Nibbles: Darwin herbarium, Saving seeds, Hunger Season, Grafting, Farmers’ rights, Vitamin A scandal, Plant hunting

Did you know Darwin collected crop wild relative specimens on the Beagle?
Saving the Running Conch. And its stories.
Melinda Gates plugs “Hunger Season.” Including to AGRA, presumably.
I want a fruit salad tree too.
If you know how to implement Farmers’ Rights, the ITPGRFA would like to hear from you.
Don’t keep taking the (vitamin A) pills.
Hunters, pirates. You pays your money…

Caribbean coast of Colombia high in cassava genetic diversity. Shakira alerted.
Costa Rica getting to grips with ITPGRFA. Not many people hurt.
Fox News Latino has a dietician tell us about Inca foods. In other news, Fox News has a Latino bit.
Plant Cuttings!
Did you celebrate the International Day of Struggle against Monoculture Tree Plantations? And does what’s happening with açaí qualify as plantations?
The London Olympics backlash begins. If you don’t agree with all that, here’s how to make your own meadow. Or restore one. Any crop wild relatives in all meadow-making?
Nice pic of squash diversity.
Very geeky presentation on how sequencing the wheat genome is going to solve all our problems. If you can follow it, you’re already convinced.
Floating plastic islands full of papyrus plants will save Lake Naivasha. I don’t know, but I’d sure like to see it.

It is a diverting exercise to look for the intersection between the “Ten moments that changed history,” according to Andrew Marr’s new history of the world, and the Royal Society’s list of the “most significant invention[s] in the history of food and drink.” So I’ll leave it to you.

Don’t underestimate the importance of a new book on the Irish Famine, despite the weird construction used in praising it.
Impossible to overestimate the importance of crop breeding for climate change adaptation. And would you like a presentation with that?
Cannot underestimate the diversity of early Neolithic diets. No, wait.
Difficult to overestimate the contribution made by Prof. Randy Thaman to the conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Pacific. One of several honoured by IUCN for services to conservation.
Fed up with linguistic tricks? Well, too bad, because here’s another one. It turns out you can use agricultural biodiversity terminology as examples to explain what’s wrong with ecology.
Here we go again. Easy to underestimate the importance of IPR legislation in enabling smallholders to conserve agrobiodiversity.
Plain impossible to list the x best botanical gardens in the world.